Hey dad, your health affects your baby’s well-being too

A father’s health prior to conception is just as important as the mother’s and has a serious impact on their child’s health. christyscherrer/flickr David Gardner, The University of Melbourne; Natalie Binder, The University of Melbourne, and Natalie Hannan, The University of Melbourne As a society, we put a significant emphasis on women’s healthF both immediately prior to and during pregnancy – and rightly so. A woman needs to prepare her body for the arduous nine months of gestation ahead to give the growing baby the best possible start to life. A pregnant woman is likely to take supplements and maintain a healthy diet free of alcohol and cigarettes while protecting herself from unnecessary environmental toxin exposure. In comparison, men’s health prior to conception is relatively insignificant right? Wrong! Enter father Our research shows that male diet prior to conception – particularly a fast-food-based diet – can be significantly detrimental to pregnancy success. Using an animal model of diet-induced obesity, we compared pregnancy outcomes when fathers were either normal weight or obese. We found that rates of pregnancy were significantly lower when the father was obese because embryos generated with sperm from obese males weren’t very good and failed to implant into the mother’s uterus. When obese fathers were able...
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WhatsApp bans 2.4 million Indian accounts in July

WhatsApp banned 2.39 million Indian accounts in July, the highest so far this year, the Meta-owned popular instant messaging app said late on Thursday in its monthly report.The Asian nation’s stricter IT laws have made it necessary for large digital platforms to publish compliance reports every month.Draft rules circulated in June proposed setting up a panel to hear user appeals, and said that significant social media messaging platforms shall allow identification of the first originator of information if directed by courts to do so.Of the accounts barred, 1.42 million were ‘proactively banned,’ before any reports from users.Several accounts were banned based on complaints received through the company’s grievances channel and the tools and resources it uses to detect such offenses, the social media platform said. In July, WhatsApp received a total of 574 grievance reports.The messsaging platform, which has been criticised earlier for spreading fake news and hate speech in the country, as well as elsewhere in the world, had taken down 2.21 million accounts in India in June WhatsApp bans 2.4 million Indian accounts in July: WhatsApp bans 2.4 million Indian accounts in July:&nb...
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A synthetic embryo, made without sperm, could lead to infertility

A synthetic embryo, made without sperm or egg, could lead to infertility treatmentsScientists have created mouse embryos in a dish, and it could one day help families hoping to get pregnant, according to a new study.After 10 years of research, scientists created a synthetic mouse embryo that began forming organs without a sperm or egg, according to the study published Thursday in the journal Nature. All it took was stem cells.Stem cells are unspecialized cells that can be manipulated into becoming mature cells with special functions."Our mouse embryo model not only develops a brain, but also a beating heart, all the components that go on to make up the body," said lead study author Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, professor of mammalian development and stem cell biology at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom."It's just unbelievable that we've got this far. This has been the dream of our community for years, and a major focus of our work for a decade, and finally we've done it."The paper is an exciting advance and tackles a challenge scientists face studying mammal embryos in utero, said Marianne Bronner, a professor of biology at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena (Caltech). Bronner was not involved in the study."These develop outside of the mother and therefore can be easily visualized through critical developmental...
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Behaviors of tiniest water droplets revealed

Water mediates all biological processes, but we still don't fully understand its behavior. From Science Daily: “A new study by researchers at the University of California, San Diego, and Emory University has uncovered fundamental details about the hexamer structures that make up the tiniest droplets of water, the key component of life – and one that scientists still don't fully understand. “The research, recently published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, provides a new interpretation for experimental measurements as well as a vital test for future studies of our most precious resource. Moreover, understanding the properties of water at the molecular level can ultimately have an impact on many areas of science, including the development of new drugs or advances in climate change research.A 3-D model of the prism structure of the water hexamer, the smallest drop of water. "Ours are the first simulations that use an accurate, full-dimensional representation of the molecular interactions and exact inclusion of nuclear quantum effects through state-of-the-art computational approaches," says study co-author Joel Bowman, a theoretical chemist at Emory University. "These allow ws to accurately determine the stability of the different isomers over a wide range of temperatures." ‘"About 60% of our bodies...
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Ethics: Robots, androids, and cyborgs

There may come a time when robots, androids, and cyborgs will be more than science fiction and develop "intelligence" and with intelligence comes decision-making, freedom, responsibility--ETHICS. One of the local television stations last night dug into its vaults and aired "Westworld" [MGM-1973] written and directed by Michael Crichton and staring Yul Brynner, Richard Benjamin, and James Brolin. An inexpensive film shot on studio back lots, dessert, and Harold Lloyd's estate, the film exploits dreams of a perfect fantasy vacation [at $1,000 a day] at an amusement facility called Delos where the paying adventurer can choose from Roman World, Medieval World, and Western World. Sophisticated androids are the counterparts of the human visitors and bend at the will of human interaction with NO harm to the humans. Well, maybe. Minor glitches happen which are expected in the complicated computer setup...normal malfunction parameters as expressed by a review board. It isn't much longer when the "glitches" become more complicated and numerous until finally there ensues android revolt--utter chaos. Humans are dying. Not a good thing for the investors of Delos...paid realism with deathly results. Yul Brynner [the gunslinger from the "Western World"] runs amuck, the scientists/programers are sealed in their room with locked doors and...
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Deceased--Halton C. Arp

"Halton C. Arp, Astronomer Who Challenged Big Bang Theory, Dies at 86" By: Dennis Overbye, January 6th, 2014, The New York Times: Halton C. Arp, a prodigal son of American astronomy whose dogged insistence that astronomers had misread the distances to quasars cast doubt on the Big Bang theory of the universe and led to his exile from his peers and the telescopes he loved, died on Dec. 28 in Munich. He was 86. The cause was pneumonia, said his daughter Kristana Arp, who said he also had Parkinson’s disease. As a staff astronomer for 29 years at Hale Observatories, which included the Mount Wilson and Palomar Mountain observatories in Southern California, Dr. Arp was part of their most romantic era, when astronomers were peeling back the sky and making discovery after discovery that laid the foundation for the modern understanding of the expansion of the universe. But Dr. Arp, an artist’s son with a swashbuckling air, was no friend of orthodoxy. A skilled observer with regular access to a 200-inch telescope on Palomar Mountain, he sought out unusual galaxies and collected them in “The Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies” (1966), showing them interacting and merging with loops, swirls and streamers that showed the diversity and beauty of nature. But these galaxies also revealed something puzzling and controversial. In the expanding universe,...
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PMO announce Bharat Ratna for Prof CNR Rao and Sachin Tendulkar

Chintamani Nagesa Ramachandra Rao, also known as C.N.R. Rao (Kannada :ಚಿಂತಾಮಣಿ ನಾಗೇಶ ರಾಮಚಂದ್ರ ರಾವ್ ) (born 30 June 1934), is an Indian chemist who has worked mainly in solid-state and structural chemistry. He currently serves as the Head of the Scientific Advisory Council to the Prime Minister of India. Dr. Rao has Honorary Doctorates from 60 Universities worldwide. He has authored around 1,500 research papers and 45 scientific books. On 16th November 2013, The Government of India decided to confer upon him Bharat Ratna, the highest civilian award in India making him the third Scientist after C.V.Raman and A P J Abdul Kalam to get the award. Early life and education: C.N.R. Rao was born in Bangalore in a Kannada family to father Hanumantha Nagesa Rao, and mother Nagamma Nagesa Rao. He obtained his bachelors degree from Mysore University in 1951, obtaining a masters from BHU two years later, and obtained his Ph.D. in 1958 from Purdue University. In 1961 he received DSc from Mysore University. He joined the faculty of Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur in 1963.[He has received Honorary Doctorates from many Universities such as Bordeaux, Caen, Colorado, Khartoum, Liverpool, Northwestern, Novosibirsk, Oxford, Purdue, Stellenbosch, Universite Joseph Fourier, Wales, Wroclaw, Notre Dame, Uppsala, Aligarh...
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Young Apes Manage Emotions Like Humans

Credit: University of Wisconsin - Madison Researchers studying young bonobos in an African sanctuary have discovered striking similarities between the emotional development of the bonobos and that of children, suggesting these great apes regulate their emotions in a human-like way. This is important to human evolutionary history because it shows the socio-emotional framework commonly applied to children works equally well for apes. Using this framework, researchers can test predictions of great ape behavior and, as in the case of this study, confirm humans and apes share many aspects of emotional functioning. Zanna Clay, PhD, and Frans de Waal, PhD, of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Emory University, conducted the study at a bonobo sanctuary near Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Credit: University of Wisconsin - Madison Congo. The results are published in the current issue of theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Detailed video analysis of daily social life at the sanctuary allowed Clay and de Waal to measure how bonobos handle their own emotions as well as how they react to the emotions of others. They found the two were related in that bonobos that recovered quickly and easily from their own emotional upheavals, such as after losing...
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Elephants Understand Humans Says New Research

Credit: University of St. Andrews  Elephants understand humans in a way most other animals don’t, according to the latest research from the University of St Andrews The new study, published today (Thursday 10 October 2013) by Current Biology, found that elephants are the only wild animals to understand human pointing without any training to do so. The researchers, Anna Smet and Professor Richard Byrne from the University’s School of Psychology and Neuroscience, set out to test whether African elephants could learn to follow pointing – and were surprised to find them responding successfully from the first trial. They said, “In our study we found that African elephants spontaneously understand human pointing, without any training to do so. This has shown that the ability to understand pointing is not uniquely human but has also evolved in a lineage of animal very remote from the primates.” Elephants are part of an ancient African radiation of animals, including the hyrax, golden mole, aardvark and manatee. Elephants share with humans an elaborate and complex living network in which support, empathy and help for others are critical for survival. The researchers say that it may be only in such a society that the ability to follow pointing has adaptive value. Professor Byrne explained, “When people want to direct the attention...
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Interesting stuff about Einstein

....... "Einstein Quotes and Interesting Facts: Assassination Lists, Autopsied Brains and Socks" by James Fenner Guardian Express: According to a new book, entitled Einstein and the Quantum, written by A. Douglas Stone, Albert Einstein’s contributions towards the various fields of science, and the extent of his genius, may have been significantly overlooked. Stone, who is the chair of Yale’s Department of Applied Physics, argues, such was the magnitude of Einstein’s phenomenal works, the man could have been “… worthy of four Nobel Prizes…” In reality, the remarkable physicist was only awarded a single Nobel Prize. Throughout his book, Stone waxes lyrical about Einstein, highlighting his many accomplishments, and talking about his advancement of numerous concepts in quantum theory, and garnering enormous recognition for his theory of relativity. Einstein was, of course, renowned for his work as a physicist. However, he also contributed a great deal to philosophy, with most of his philosophical reflections having been driven by academic study. A young philosopher, called Robert Thornton, after completing his Ph.D. at Minnesota, was due to begin teaching physics at the University of Puerto Rico. Before beginning histutelage, he wanted to combine both scientific and philosophical perspectives to present a modern physics...
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Clothes of the future: where hi-tech meets high fashion

Photo: EPA It seems impossible to survive in the modern world without going either “smart” or digital, and clothes are no exception. The fashion industry is now working on technology to bring dressing habits to a completely new level. We're still in the stone age of nano-fibres and networked apparel but, in the not too distant future, you can count on having a coat which tells your mom where you are and having the Encyclopaedia Britannica embedded in your underwear! According to IMS Research, about 14m wearable tech devices were produced in 2011; by 2016, the global market could reach $6bn. Nancy Tilbury, designer to the stars and one of the creators of the futuristic Studio XO, predicts, “Generation Digital are constantly connected and live their lives digitally. Clothes are the next logical step”. Though thought of now as innovation, tampering with textiles and technology has been going on for over a thousand years. Artisans have been wrapping fine golden and silver foil around fabric threads since as early as the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. At the end of the 19th century, with the advent of electric appliances, designers and engineers sought to combine electricity with clothing and jewellery; the so-called Electric Girl Lighting Company hired out young ladies wearing light-adorned evening gowns to brighten up cocktail parties....
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